Introducing Character Animation with Blender

515 Pages·2007·24.14 MB·English

by  Tony Mullen

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Introducing Character
Animation with Blender
TONY MULLEN
WILEY PUBLISHING, INC.
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Introducing Character
Animation with Blender
TONY MULLEN
WILEY PUBLISHING, INC.
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Acquisitions Editor: Pete Gaughan
Development Editor: Jim Compton
Technical Editor: D. Roland Hess
Production Editor: Eric Charbonneau
Copy Editor: Nancy Sixsmith
Production Manager: Tim Tate
Vice President and Executive Group Publisher: Richard Swadley
Vice President and Executive Publisher: Joseph B. Wikert
Vice President and Publisher: Neil Edde
Media Project Supervisor: Laura Atkinson
Media Development Specialist: Kate Jenkins
Book Designer: Caryl Gorska
Compositor: Kate Kaminski, Happenstance Type-O-Rama
Proofreader: Jen Larsen
Indexer: Nancy Guenther
Anniversary Logo Design: Richard Pacifico
Cover Designer: Ryan Sneed
Cover Images: Mauro Bonecchi, Sacha Goedegebure, the Blender
Foundation’s Orange Project, Yuichi Miura
Copyright © 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN: 978-0-4701-0260-2
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Acknowledgments
First and foremost,
I would like to thank all the developers of Blender
who, under Ton Roosendaal’s very capable leadership, have created what I consider to be
the most powerful and reliable piece of open-source software available to artists of any
kind. Blender’s open development model means that most of these developers are work-
ing purely out of love for the project, and they deserve credit for their tremendous efforts
and prodigious skills. You can find a complete list of the contributors to Blender’s code
for each release on the appropriate release notes pages at www.blender.org. In addition to
the developers of the code, I would like to specifically thank the Orange Project team for
its hard work on creating the ideal showcase for Blender’s capabilities, Elephants Dream,
and for its generosity in releasing it as an “open movie” for everyone to enjoy and learn
from. I would also like to extend special thanks to Claudio “malefico” Andaur and all
involved in the Plumiferos project for supplying me with material from that very promis-
ing production. ■ Because classes and textbooks on Blender have so far been difficult to
come by, becoming a skilled Blender user is almost by necessity a community endeavor.
For this reason, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Blender users who regularly post at
the BlenderArtists forum (http://blenderartists.org/forum/) and enable less-experienced
users to benefit from their knowledge. The users and developers posting in this forum
ensure that it remains the single most useful resource for Blenderers of all levels, and I
learned most of what I know about Blender from people there. I would like to single out a
few regular posters there who, knowingly or unknowingly, have been particularly helpful
to me in my work on this book: Andy Dolphin (AndyD), Mike Stramba, (mstram), Roland
Hess (Harkyman), Jason Pierce (Sketchy), Aligorith, Calvin, Jason van Gumster (Fweeb),
Jonathan Williamson (mr_bomb), Derek Marsh (BgDM), Fligh, Jorge Rocha (Toloban),
TorQ, Greybeard, Tom Musgrove (LetterRip), Campbell Barton (cambo), Andrew Cruse
(Basil_Fawlty), Enrico Valenza (Env), Gimble, broken, and Nozzy. These are a few of the
true Blender gurus, and I highly recommend readers of this book to take advantage of
their knowledge and their willingness to share it. I also would like to extend my gratitude
to the moderators of that forum who help to make it such a great environment. And of
course, I am very grateful to all of the extraordinarily talented artists who supplied me
with renders for the gallery and animations or .blendfiles for the accompanying DVD.
Their excellent work provides a compelling showcase of what Blender is capable of. ■ This
book wouldn’t have seen the light of day without the support and expertise of editors Pete
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Gaughan and Jim Compton, marketing manager Kelly Trent, as well as the efforts of all at
Sybex who had a hand in putting the book together and getting it out. I would like to thank
them all very much. Many thanks also to Bassam Kurdali and especially Roland Hess for
enabling me to benefit from their Blender expertise through their comments and corrections
as technical editors on the book. I would also like to express my gratitude to all of my col-
leagues at Tsuda College in Tokyo for their support for this book and to my students for
allowing some of my enthusiasm for Blender to rub off on them. ■ On a personal note, I
would like to express my gratitude to Yuka Haraguchi for her encouragement, support, and
patience throughout my work on this book and all my time-and-attention-consuming
Blender-related activities. I would also like to extend very special thanks to my mother for
taking me along on her trips to the art supply store when I was a child—especially for the
day when she acquiesced to the pleas of six-year-old me and bought me my own copy of
Preston Blair’s Animation(which I still own to this day). ■ Finally, I’d like to dedicate this
book to the memory of my father, whose impressive collection of vintage Pogo books helped
to instill in me a love of cartooning in all its forms, and whose keen interest in the evolution
of computer graphics would have made him a natural Blender fan.
About the Author
Tony Mullen,
Ph.D., has a broad background in CG-related work. He cur-
rently teaches in the Department of Computer Science at Tsuda College in Tokyo, in which
his courses have included modeling and animation using the Blender open-source 3D
software package and courses on the Python programming language (the language used
for scripting in Blender). He has worked as a newspaper cartoonist, illustrator, animator,
computer programmer, researcher, and university lecturer.
As a freelance animator, Mullen has created animations for several independent film-
makers and for the Jido Kanji educational software project. As an independent filmmaker
himself, he worked on several short films, including the award-winning Super-8 short The
Devices of Gustav Braüstache, Bachelor of Science(co-writer), and the recently completed
16 mm live action/stop motion animated film Gustav Braüstache and the Auto-Debilitator
(co-writer and co-director with Rob Cunningham, lead animator), which is currently in
submission at several international film festivals. Mullen is currently completing work on
an animated short of his own in Blender.
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Contents
Forewords viii
Introduction x
PART I ■ CREATING A CHARACTER
WITH BLENDER 1
Chapter 1■ Blender Basics: Interface
and Objects 3
Work Areas and Window Types 4
Navigating the 3D Space 9
Objects and Datablocks 18
User Preferences 24
Chapter 2■ Working with Meshes 27
Polygons and Subsurfacing 28
Extrusion Modeling and Box Modeling 32
Chapter 3■ Completing the Model with
Materials, Textures, and Particles 89
Material Datablock 90
Material Properties 92
Textures and UV Mapping 99
Using Static Particles 116
Chapter 4■ Armatures and Rigging 129
Blender Armature System 130
Building a Simple Armature 131
Rigging Captain Blender 141
Chapter 5■ Shape Keys and Facial Rigging 187
Shape Key Basics 188
Building a Shape Key Set for Captain Blender 198
Facial Bones and Controls 217
Improved Mesh Deformations Using
Driven Shape Keys 234
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PART II ■ BRINGING IT TO LIFE: ANIMATION 239
Chapter 6■ Basics of Animation 241
Keyframes and Ipos 242
Using the Ipo Editor: Bouncing a Ball 244
Interpolation and Extend Types 252
Chapter 7■ Armature Animation 259
Posing and Keyframing with the
Action Editor 260
Walk and Run Cycles 273
Pose-to-Pose Animation 288
Chapter 8■ Facial Animation and Lip Sync 299
Facial Posing 300
Lip Sync 306
Playback 312
Chapter 9■ Nonlinear Animation 315
Using the NLA Editor 316
NLA in Action 325
Mixing Actions: Walking and Talking 337
Chapter 10■ Further Issues in
Character Animation 341
Interacting with Props 342
Deformation with Lattices 350
Softbodies and Metaballs 356
Chapter 11■ Lighting, Rendering, and
Editing Your Animation 363
Lighting Basics 364
Rendering Your Animation 379
Editing in the Sequence Editor 383
Chapter 12■ Using Python Scripts 387
Installing and Executing Python Scripts 388
Standard Scripts 389
Extended Functionality with Scripts 396
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PART III ■ BLENDER IN PRODUCTION 399
Chapter 13■ Full-Scale Productions:
Elephants Dream and Plumiferos 401
GPL, Creative Commons, and the
Blender Artistic License 402
Elephants Dream, the World’s First
“Open Movie” 403
A Preview of Plumiferos 405
Chapter 14■ A Look Into Elephants Dream 407
Proog and Emo Rigs 408
Texturing Proog 421
Ways of Walking: Following a Path vs.
a Manually Keyed Walk 422
Tips on Studying the Elephants Dream Files 424
Chapter 15■ Feifi the Canary: Plumiferos
Takes Wing 427
Introducing Feifi 428
Rigging a Cartoon Bird 432
Chapter 16■ Blender in the Pipeline 441
Production Pipeline 442
Using Libraries 445
Collaboration with Subversion and Verse 445
…and Back Into Blender 446
PART IV ■ BLENDER AND BEYOND 449
Chapter 17■ Other Software and Formats 451
Importing and Exporting Other
File Formats 452
Useful Open-Source Software for
Blender Artists 453
Blending into the (Near) Future 457
Chapter 18■ Resources for Further Learning 459
Selected Online Resources 460
Recommended Books 464
On Becoming a Blender Master 466
Index 467